Fixing a pass-through bedroom

April 13, 2006 10:09 AM

Say you purchased a two-bedroom condo, but one bedroom was only accessible by walking through the other. What would you do about it?

There's a few options we're considering. None of them are perfect, but I was wondering if anyone else could propose ideas that might stimulate us. We plan to use the far bedroom as ours and the other one as a guest bedroom. Here's what we're considering:

1) Do nothing. Anyone who's cheap, friendly, or desperate enough to stay at our place instead of a hotel can deal with us walking through the room a couple times overnight.

2) Build a wall. We can make a hallway along one side of the room, between the two doors. It'll make the room a little smaller, but it'll still be big enough (something like 8'x10'). Unfortunately, the only windows in the first bedroom would be blocked off by the new wall, so we'd need to come up with some clever solution to make it not feel like a dark cave. (We've considered French Doors or a frosted glass windowbox above the door to help bring in light from the hallway but preserve a sense of privacy.)

3) Make the room not a bedroom. It could be a study or a dining room. It kinda eliminates the use of buying a two-bedroom condo, though. And if we do something to make it feel like not-a-bedroom, like expand the doorway or break down part of a wall to the kitchen, then we'll have to resell it as a 1 or 1+ bedroom. And would that reduce the market value?

posted by Plutor to Home & Garden (22 answers total)

Don't create a windowless room. Rather than a permanent wall, hang up a curtain, or get one of these. When you don't have guests you leave it open and have use of the whole room.
posted by beagle at 10:21 AM on April 13, 2006

At least around here that bedroom you have to go through would only be called a half-bedroom. So it's a 1.5 BR place!

I'd probably do some of #1 and some of #3 and make it an office or something, but put a futon in it that people can sleep on. Depending on how often you have guests and how much they hate seeing you in the middle of the night, #2 might make some sense, but you'd be essentially investing effort and money into turning usable room space into hallway space.
posted by aubilenon at 10:22 AM on April 13, 2006

I'd want my money back. As far as I know, if a room is only accessible from another room it can't be considered a bedroom. So what you purchased was a one-bedroom condo.

This is true in Massachusetts anyway, and I'm assuming you're in America because I'm in America and that's what we do.

To answer the question:

If the room is only going to be used occasionally, I'd get some curtain material or a folding partition to hang up when a guest came over. You might not care, and some friends might not care, but a lot of people would feel weird cutting through someone else's bedroom.

Putting up a wall would be too much work for an occasional guest and it would make the room a lot smaller.

In my house the only way to get to the bathroom is by cutting through either our room or my son's room. The last guest who stayed on our couch ended up going outside to pee. We also gave her a chamber pot as a joke, though had she used it it would have been perfectly understandable.
posted by bondcliff at 10:22 AM on April 13, 2006

I'd do a variation on 2, something like frosted glass panels that create a wall but let light through and are easily reconfigured or removed. I'd assume you could find (or have made) panels that would fit floor to ceiling (open at one end for the door) so it wasn't simply a screen, but would still remain modular.

You'll get the benefits of two bedrooms but you're not locked in to a specific configuration.
posted by jalexei at 10:22 AM on April 13, 2006

Make it a study with a fold-out bed. That way you can accommodate guests when they're there, but also actually use the room when they're not.

As for the ability to make it private when you do have guests: What's the exact lay-out? Is going through that room the only way to get out of the main bedroom? Would you have to go through that room to get to the bathroom? Any other concerns?
posted by occhiblu at 10:24 AM on April 13, 2006

It sounds like you've got a 1-bedroom apartment already, sorry to say. If there's no other dining room in the place, and you're making that "bedroom" you dining room, maybe it was intended to be a dining room.

I think option #1 is the best. Or maybe an office/guest bedroom combo. When it comes time to move, take all the stuff out, and try to sell it as a 2-BR unit.
posted by clearlynuts at 10:26 AM on April 13, 2006

If you'd go so far as building a wall, maybe you could instead add a door that would give you access from another room.
posted by leapingsheep at 10:36 AM on April 13, 2006

How about sliding shoji screens? You could have just one narrow shoji wall in place most of the time, then slide out the rest when you want to enclose the space. And the screen would let enough light through that the room wouldn't feel so dark/cramped. Something like this might work for you. (This website is just the first I found, I'm sure there are a million others who sell this.)
posted by brain_drain at 10:40 AM on April 13, 2006

I had a bedroom like this growing up except that it was in an old house not a new one. My sister needed to walk through my bedroom to get to hers, or crawl up through the eaves in the barn. It was a horrible set-up. Once I became a teenager we built a wall for a hallway for her, though it did manage to make my room terribly tiny and dark. Later on they added some high windows in the wall to get some light in.

If you guys have guests over frequently, or are thinking of having kids, I'd go the hallway route. If not, I think sliding shoji screens or just fold-up screens of some sort are a good alternative for sometimes guests. Have some sort of couch/bed thing so the room is an office most of the time.
posted by jessamyn at 10:57 AM on April 13, 2006

Those shoji's are pretty cool, I'll second that motion and withdraw the accordian screen idea.
posted by beagle at 10:57 AM on April 13, 2006

Response by poster: Just to make it clear, we knew exactly the layout of the condo before we even made an offer. We decided that even with the strange bedroom, it's great and huge and bright and more than worth what we're paying. So breaking off the deal or asking for our money back isn't really an option. We're happy with the place, but we're just trying to come up with a method to get the most out of the room.
posted by Plutor at 11:09 AM on April 13, 2006

I don't have enough information on the layout to know if this would work or not, but could you simply add another entrance into your bedroom? It would eliminate the light into the room, yet still give you two bedrooms without giving up any space in the second one.
posted by NotMyselfRightNow at 11:13 AM on April 13, 2006

Response by poster: Oh, yeah, those shoji screens are an awesome compromise. Keep the ideas coming!
posted by Plutor at 11:13 AM on April 13, 2006

Response by poster: Another entrance would be extremely difficult at best. Both the kitchen and the bathroom would both need to be seriously renovated in order to create a doorway anywhere other than the existing one.
posted by Plutor at 11:17 AM on April 13, 2006

In most cities an egress window (big enough for a firefighter to enter/exit) is required for the room to be called or used as a bedroom.
posted by J-Garr at 12:48 PM on April 13, 2006

With a photo or scanned-in floorplan, the good folk at Apartment Therapy would help you.

The site also has examples of tiny, gorgeous, livable spaces, some of which may be useful to apply to your situation.
posted by Sallyfur at 1:24 PM on April 13, 2006

I wish I had a diagram of the layout to work from, but...

#1: if you go the hallway route, try to keep as much of that space useable as possible. F'rinstance, don't have a long thin hallway with a bedroom door in the side and a bedroom door at the end; put the door into your back bedroom as far forward in the hallway as possible (just after the windows, say) so that your back bedroom has a little foyer of sorts.

#2: consider a short wall, creating a walk-through space instead of a hallway, then have shutters or other panels that can pull down/sideways/snap in place between the top of the short wall and the ceiling; this means you wouldn't have a door to this room, but your guest would have 90% privacy when they needed it -- and you wouldn't be walking THROUGH their room, you'd be walking BY it.

#3: are you on the top floor? you can always put skylights above the second bedroom, if you end up closing it off.

Can't suggest more without afloorplan, sorry.
posted by davejay at 3:24 PM on April 13, 2006

Ditto J-Gar. If you block off the window you won't be able to sell it as a 2 bedroom.
posted by handful of rain at 4:54 PM on April 13, 2006

To expand upon J-Garr's comment, creating any room without sufficient window space is probably against your local building code. If this should be discovered, an inspector can order the new wall dismantled.
posted by Daddio at 5:29 PM on April 13, 2006

This is true in Massachusetts anyway, and I'm assuming you're in America because I'm in America and that's what we do.

And the fact they called it a 'condo' ;-)
posted by wackybrit at 1:31 AM on April 14, 2006

Response by poster: Here you go, guys, a rough drawing of the layout. Also, it's the bottom floor.
posted by Plutor at 4:09 AM on April 14, 2006

Get or make folding screens to put up when you have company. 2 of these would do nicely:
http://www.overstock.com/cgi-bin/d2.cgi?PAGE=PROFRAME&PROD_ID=1175826
http://www.overstock.com/cgi-bin/d2.cgi?PAGE=PROFRAME&PROD_ID=828118
http://www.overstock.com/cgi-bin/d2.cgi?PAGE=PROFRAME&PROD_ID=512851
posted by theora55 at 5:41 AM on April 14, 2006